Katie Bouman Accidentally Became the Face of the Black Hole Project
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. I have zero experience seeing women in STEM treated badly. I'm sure it exists, but I've never seen it. Exactly the contrary. So whenever I personally see these articles, I think it's a solution looking for a problem. For example, see this article: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1095957/Google-news-gen...
2. I'm not sure how much Katie likes to be reduced down to what is between her legs given the combined years of dedication it took to be able to achieve the results that the team achieved.
In general, can we please applaud the people and not the identities? It's so sad to see this approach to celebrating achievements. I don't want my children to be labelled based on something they have no control over.
A silver lining in this cloud is that "normies" don't really think this way, it's just the media.
Remarkably I think today was the first time I recall seeing the name of even the director of the project (much less other teammates who may have had major roles) after having seen various posts about this over the past week.
If you go back I bet you will see other names in the texts you’ve read, but the collaboration itself didn’t try to sell anyone like the brains behind the picture, so there is not much to naturally focus on.
I don't see it that way. Combining societal elements to a scientific or engineering challenge is nothing new (e.g., Voyager's gold disc recording, Armstrong's one-small-step line, SpaceX launching a Tesla roadster).
Similarly, imaging a black hole was an achievement of human society at large, and the fact that an achievement in one aspect of society (i.e., scientific knowledge) is linked to another (i.e., egalitarianism) makes the moment even more special. It makes the event feel like this isn't just a single narrow step in one direction, but movement forward of our entire civilization.
Hopefully we can get across to kids, don't avoid STEM out of fear, because there's definitely not a 100% chance that you will be signing yourself up for a lifelong struggle. One time someone told me that the worst part was how the other gender was extremely awkward around them in college. No, you are not going to have to storm the beaches of Normandy.
On the strength of this evidence I guess you agree that they can’t be that common, surely not as much as 70% of all property crimes?
Robberies... I know someone who was robbed by a immigrant, and I believe them. I also know that social economic factors play a huge role in crime, and that people who flee from war and immigrant to my country is on average on the lower scale on the social economic ladder.
So what generalization should we apply here? Best practice is basically to do nothing and see to the individuals.
I couldn't believe this based on my personal experience (burglarized 3 times; robbed 0). Looking into it further, police statistics support my skepticism.
In Canada, where my personal experience applies, robbery is considered a violent crime, not a property crime, but I suppose we can compare the rate regardless.
In 2017, there were 62 reported robberies per 100,000 people. This is in comparison to 3,523 property crimes per 100,000 people. Thus, robberies would make up 2% of all property crimes.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2018001/article...
I don't get this kind of reasoning at all. It really doesn't matter if you personally have not experienced such kind of behavior, only that we have reasonable evidence to believe it does. And as journalists have shown over the past couple of years, abuse of vulnerable women/minorities is a lot more widespread than what it was earlier believed to be.
What? You realize all the recent guardrails that conferences have in place are there for a reason, right? They didn't materialize out of thin air. There have been many, many, many reports of various forms of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct which necessitated their creation.
I am not familiar with the conference you mention and can thus not comment on it.
Apparently this triggered some people and the guy had to go on an apology tour.
Journalists will write whatever sells the most clicks. They're not some kind of scientists.
Because STEM people are doing mostly STEM stuff. They are not actively investigating workplace conditions. So they only have a limited view of the entire space of "STEM workplace conditions". Journalists _are_ actively investigating workplace conditions and their findings should be treated with more seriousness than your friends or some person on HN.
> Journalists will write whatever sells the most clicks.
I agree the incentives aren't exactly well lined up to always promote ethical behavior in journalism, but its not as flippant as you portray. It is a serious profession and most journalists treat it as such.
> They're not some kind of scientists.
Agreed. But like I mention earlier, I trust their findings more than of my personal experience or that of people I may have first-hand experience with.
- The findings on academic hiring suggest that many women fared well in the hiring process at Research I institutions, which contradicts some commonly held perceptions of research-intensive universities. If women applied for positions at RI institutions, they had a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than had male job candidates.
- The percentage of women who were interviewed for tenure-track or tenured positions was higher than the percentage of women who applied.
- For all disciplines the percentage of tenure-track women who received the first job offer was greater than the percentage in the interview pool.
- Female tenure-track and tenured faculty reported that they were more likely to have mentors than male faculty.
- Women were more likely than men to receive tenure when they came up for tenure review.
"Our results suggest that men and women share some but not all motivations for entering IT. [..] men were significantly more likely than women to identify "love of technology/computers" as a key motivator. Women, on the other hand, more often indicated that "job security," "ease of entry," and "flexible work hours" were primary reasons for entering the profession. This pattern of results suggests that factors in the work itself are more important in the career decision making of male IT professionals, while factors around the job (such as flexible hours) are more important in the decision making of female IT professionals. "
"Men and women in our survey both generally reported a similar level of experience with role models. [..] This surprising finding does not support previous assumptions that the lack of females in IT means a lack of role models for women, which was assumed to be a disadvantage for women."
"Our findings uncovered only one significant gender difference across a variety of work-related experiences. [..] They differed in regard to their perceptions of supervisor support related to their careers. This finding indicates that women perceive greater support in meeting career goals, recognizing opportunities, and improving their job performance."
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...
The phenomenon where you then still keep believing every word written about other topics is known as "the Gell-Mann amnesia effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
As for the topic at hand, it's good to remember that "Gender situation in STEM is pretty good" is not a story. That never gets published. Not because of any political agenda, but because it's boring and non alarmist.
Is this the current state of our education? This is straight up indoctrination. Does this thinking carry over to other areas? If you are not informed by your personal experiences how could one hope to be more than a shell for others thoughts and ideas?
Hmm...have you heard of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
My first experience with journalistic "accuracy" was when I was a kid, Der Spiegel did an article on my dad. They mentioned his children (so my sister and myself) but got everything wrong. It's not that it was hard to find this out, they could have asked him, they could have asked us, they could have asked our mother, whatever. If they didn't want to bother to find out, they could have left that "information" out of the article. Instead they just chose to make something up. Who cares?
Once I started to have some knowledge of things in the world, I absolutely experienced the effect that every single time they wrote about something I had first hand knowledge of, they got it not just completely, but outright comically wrong.
But don't take my word for it, here's a recent example that became public knowledge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius
The guy just made up stories, and I mean that literally. They were good stories, things that felt good, things that had a narrative that felt good. They were, in fact, pretty good fiction, and as fiction they would have been fine. But they were presented as reporting.
If you think is an isolated case, I have some Nevada oceanfront property I want to sell you. Or maybe a New York bridge?
So I am wary and skeptical of "reporting" in general. I am especially wary and skeptical of "reporting" that matches a popular narrative. And I am extremely skeptical of "reporting" that completely contradicts my personal experience and that of most if not all the people around me.
That obviously doesn't "prove" the reporting is wrong, but taking such reporting as primary or even sole evidence is at best naive.
YMMV.
This is the reason people respond with "I've never seen it", it is a natural reaction once something is presented as widespread.
I don't doubt it's happening, but at the same time I'm tired of the media and other activists beating the drum of female rights (and those of other gazillions of minorities) and rubbing my face in the fact that my gender is bad and my race is bad every damn time.
I was reading a book about feminism in Germany and the whole movement jumped the shark and now they're trying to paint being male as something undesirable and actively pursue a strategy of positive discrimination for women. This is exactly what's happening in the US and many other countries with minority rights movements - they're lashing out at white men as the root of all evil, harming essentially random people.
Activists latched on to a strategy of shaming and silencing so-called opponents which is already starting to badly back-fire (as it rightly should).
I’ve come to believe that one of the core problems of journalism today is Twitter. It provides a false narrative as to what people care about in the world that lazy journalists just report on. At scale, it’s purely reactionary and partisan, so it’s easy to filter for the audience you want to target a message to.
Incendiary Twitter bullshit gets way too much press as a result.
It's like you've never read any HN threads in your life.
Why is a person sexist and homophobic [1] for wondering why two major news articles say the opposite thing [1,2]:
[1]: "Katherine Bouman, a 29-year-old postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual." https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/12/trolls-hija...
[2]: "While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-blac...
Getting down to your question I am not sure the fault lies with those who are wondering about the difference between two opposing statements in the media. The piece I take issue is that as soon as the picture of her with the image of the black hole started to go viral the first thing many people did was check her contributions to a repo on github to quantify the code that she wrote for the project as a way to measure her which ultimately seems like something someone would do out of feelings of inadequacy.
Her current/future employers, her colleagues, and every academic's employers and colleagues, want to know contributions. Some fields make you explicitly list them for each paper. No doubt feelings of inadequacy feed into this at some point, but it's part of the job and isn't saved for just measuring women.
Given that those who counted LoC ultimately had the correct view -- that the initial viral story was not accurate -- perhaps they deserve a little more credit than that. It's kind of a 'low blow' to suggest the critics could only care because they don't 'measure up' -- if you know what I mean. You seem to have a rather ironic notion of the source of virtue, given the present controversy.
I agree though, that LoC is a lousy metric. This is a case where a concise algorithm might still have been essential.
https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...
TL;DR: “the repo” in question was one of multiple imaging libraries that were used, and the lines-of-code count was vastly inflated by counting machine-generated files, so the original claim was basically nonsense. In terms of Bouman’s contributions, she was the primary author of “the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes”, so she did play a meaningful role, as one of many different people involved in the collaboration. On the other hand, assuming the Post article’s mention of an “algorithm” is meant to refer to CHIRP, it is in error, since CHIRP was not used to create the current images:
> Data from the EHT was analysed by four separate teams to verify the findings. Two teams relied on a tried-and-true computational imaging method called CLEAN, while the other two used a newer technique called regularised maximum likelihood (RML), which had been honed by Bouman, astrophysicist Andrew Chael from Harvard (who has also been celebrated for this work), and colleagues for the needs of the black hole imaging project.
- https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2019041...
Yeah? You wouldn't find this confusing as a lay person? Many articles said she created the algorithm. As I said, she didn't "accidentally" become the face of the image. It's due to these journalistic errors.
I'm not going to blame "the media" for the existence of an exaggerated impression based on two articles that explicitly debunk that impression, even if one of them has an error.
Also, while false impressions are one thing, I don't really regret that she became the face of the black hole image, per se. People fundamentally want to praise other people rather than abstract entities, and if it was going to be anyone, it might as well be the subject of such a great photo – the juxtaposition of the laptop (with black hole image visible) and the look on her face really captures the idea and emotion of scientific accomplishment.